Movies & TV

By: VIBE/ December 9, 2013

The 2013 Directors Guild of America award recipient knows a thing or three about developing rich characters that keep audiences interested and engaged. A new chat with Vulture finds the Scandal creator and head writer filling in the gaps about Harrison’s past, the tortuous brutality of Season Three, and hints at a possible spin-off.

Her shows such as Grey’s Anatomy, Private Practice and, of course, Scandal have earned her a bevy of awards and distinctions, but she wins at utilizing our multicultural landscape in the process.

With the third season of the Scandal shocking fans every week, the recipient of the 2014 Diversity Award (along with business partner Betsy Beers) sat down to talk about some of her biggest creative gambles, and more. Be careful, as there are some spoilers below:

On Harrison’s Developing Plot…

“We had a whole plan for it… Our production schedule is really difficult because in order to cram in all those story lines and move as fast as we do, we have to shoot a lot of scenes — 306 was one of our scripts that had the least amount of scenes. We were all like, “This was so easy!” and then I watched the episode and went, “… and also slow and boring.” The pace was off. So I was like, let’s take the Adnan story and put it in. It will make everything tighter and faster. We just moved it up.”

On Scandal’s Brutality…

“Everybody in the room accepted it because we’re not watching the show. Huck likes to cut off people’s fingers and toes and abuse them with drills and somehow we’ve decided he’s the sweetest one [out of the entire cast]. The visual [of a man of color bound and torturing a white woman] of that I had a really strong reaction to. This feels more disturbing than Maya Pope chewing her wrists open. And I like that. In a weird way, it places you exactly in Quinn’s hands: a man who she loves and respects is doing what is essentially a terrible, but in his mind a very necessary thing that he admits to enjoying.”

On A Possible Scandal Spinoff…

“I’ve openly thought about — I say openly because I’ve told people at the network about it — doing a spinoff that was just B6-13. I feel like that’s a really interesting world. We don’t know a ton about it yet, but it’s very dark and there’s much to do. But, I’m too busy writing Scandal right now to think about it.”

The full chat with Scandal creator Shonda Rhimes can be read by clicking here.